Google has begun automatically encrypting Gmail, as it steps up efforts to keep mail from “being snooped by third parties”.
Though the company did not cite China as a reason for its beefed up security, the move comes just a day after the company accused Chinese hackers of breaking into the accounts of human rights activists.
“Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public Wi-Fi hotspots,” Google says in a blog.
“We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there’s a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn’t travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we’ve been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do.”
Though the company is encrypting mail by default, Google will allow users who find it too slow to turn it off in the options.
The move comes on the day that Adobe admitted that the attacks on its network were related to the ones reported by Google.
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